Call for 4.3.29 Patches 🔗 link

I've been trying to go through the backlog to identify un-applied
patches, but I know there are some that I'm missing. If you have
build fixes or runtime changes that have not yet been put in in
4.3.29 already (see:
https://sourceforge.net/p/xymon/code/HEAD/tree/branches/4.3.29/Changes),
I'd appreciate if you could point them out.

On 3/26/19 2:27 PM, Axel Beckert wrote:

Hi JC,

On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 01:37:32PM -0700, Japheth Cleaver wrote:

I'm pushing for a release of 4.3.29 relatively soon.

Cool, thanks!

I've been trying to go through the backlog to identify un-applied
patches, but I know there are some that I'm missing. If you have
build fixes or runtime changes that have not yet been put in in
4.3.29 already (see:
https://sourceforge.net/p/xymon/code/HEAD/tree/branches/4.3.29/Changes),
I'd appreciate if you could point them out.

Here are the patches Debian applies to 4.3.28:
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/xymon/tree/master/debian/patches

I'll try to categorize them quickly:

Missing fixes:

* 39_kfreebsd-makefile.patch: Support for the GNU/kFreeBSD
   architecture/platform (i.e. FreeBSD kernel with GNU instead of BSD
   userland).

* 42_bbcombotest-fix.patch: Fix bbcombotest: "Could not access hobbitd
   board, error 0". (Don't have more details, sorry. Christoph might
   perhaps remember more details.)

* 63_netstat-ant-vs-ipv6-address-truncating.patch: Port monitoring
   seems to cut off IPv6 addresses. This seems to be unrelated to "Fix
   RRD parsing for recent netstat (net-tools) on Linux".

* 66_apache2.4.patch: Some Apache 2.4 fixes. Since Apache 2.2 is End
   of Life already, IMHO you do not need to care for the old syntax
   anymore. Then again, some distributions with long-term support might
   still have Apache 2.2, so you might want to cross-check if that has
   some impact there.

* 84_fix_compilation_on_GNU_Hurd.patch: Fixes compilation on the GNU
   Hurd architecture/platform.

* 90_fix-spelling-errors.patch: Spelling error fixes.

Can't be used 1:1, but shows what is missing:

* 51_hardening-buildflags.patch: CFLAGS are hardcoded and don't
   respect any such environment variable.

Feature patches:

* 27_hobbit_files_ifexist.patch: Adds an "ifexist" feature to the
   files check.

Might be no more needed:

* 69_disk-no-duplicate-root.patch: Ignore duplicate submissions for
   the "/" partition. For a while Debian and some other distributions
   report the root partition twice because it got remounted during
   boot. I though don't see that behaviour on a current Debian Stable
   anymore.

State unclear:

* 33_526176-ldap.patch: There seems to be an LDAP API change necessary
   some time in the future (for 10 years now) and this seems to be the
   lazy workaround. See https://bugs.debian.org/526176

   I must admit, I'm not sure if that's still necessary. This has been
   added to Debian in April 2009, but
   https://sourceforge.net/p/xymon/code/HEAD/tree/branches/4.3.29/Changes
   says that Hernik worked on this in November 2008 and it was included
   in the 4.2.2 release in December 2008. And Debian shipped 4.2.2 in
   January 2009 and added this patch in April 2009 with 4.3.0 beta2. So
   those things don't seem to have overlapped each other. And these
   changelog entries don't sound as if this has been fixed properly

   r5990 | storner | 2008-11-28 07:43:02 +0100 (Fri, 28 Nov 2008) | 1 line
   Changed paths:
      M /branches/4.2.2/build/test-ldap.c

   Build properly with new OpenLDAP API by using deprecated functions.
   […]
   r5995 | storner | 2008-11-28 10:27:42 +0100 (Fri, 28 Nov 2008) | 1 line
   Changed paths:
      M /branches/4.2.2/bbnet/ldaptest.h

   Build properly with new OpenLDAP API by using deprecated functions (missed ldaptest.h in previous commit)
   
   But then again, I'd wonder why this "lazy" fix worked for now 10
   years without causing issues with the deprecated LDAP functions
   finally being removed.

(Probably)already included patches:

* 00_htmlcontenttype.patch: Seems to be "Ensure Content-Type always
   set in HTML headers (Thanks, Christoph Berg)"

* 24_hobbitclient-tmpfs.patch: Might be "Ignore additional common
   tmpfs partitions on recent Linux", but you might want to
   cross-check.

* 87_fix_logfetch_FTBFS_with_glibc_2.26.patch: Applied in r8030.

These seem to be Debian specific patches are are marked as not needing
to be forwarded to upstream, so you can safely ignore them:

* 03_doc-paths.patch: Debian-specific path changes.
* 09_hobbitclient-debian.patch: Adds a dpkg section to client reports.
* 12_hobbitvars.patch: Debian-specific path changes.
* 21_FHS-instead-FSSTND-in-example-in-man-page.patch: Debian-specific
   path changes.
* 30_prefer-packaged-temp-plugin-over-unpackaged-devmon.patch:
   Different default settings with regards to one plugin.
* 45_fix-configure-for-multiarch.patch: Debian-specific generated
   paths.
* 48_png-multiarch.patch: Debian-specific generated paths.

		Kind regards, Axel

On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 04:23:33PM -0700, Bruce Ferrell wrote:

* 66_apache2.4.patch: Some Apache 2.4 fixes. Since Apache 2.2 is End
  of Life already, IMHO you do not need to care for the old syntax
  anymore. Then again, some distributions with long-term support might
  still have Apache 2.2, so you might want to cross-check if that has
  some impact there.

while Apache 2.2 is EOL, there are a LOT of distros and
installations that still have it running running back ports.

and has the potential of creating a lot of heartache by taking it
out...

		Kind regards, Axel
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On 3/26/19 4:41 PM, Axel Beckert wrote:

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 04:23:33PM -0700, Bruce Ferrell wrote:

* 66_apache2.4.patch: Some Apache 2.4 fixes. Since Apache 2.2 is End
   of Life already, IMHO you do not need to care for the old syntax
   anymore. Then again, some distributions with long-term support might
   still have Apache 2.2, so you might want to cross-check if that has
   some impact there.

while Apache 2.2 is EOL, there are a LOT of distros and
installations that still have it running running back ports.

So far I only can come up with RHEL/CentOS 6, Debian 7 Wheezy ELTS
(EoL in about two months) and Ubuntu 12.04 ESM (i.e. paid-only LTS)
who still provide Apache 2.2.

At least Wheezy and Ubuntu 12.04 ship Xymon out of the box and I would
be surprised if anyone on these releases follows upstream source code
instead of using the distro-provided packages (with older Xymon
versions).

So probably the only still relevant distro shipping Apache 2.2 is
RHEL/CentOS 6. JC probably knows better how wide-spread Xymon is
there.

I'd say it costs nothing to leave in

IMHO the cost is primarily to figure out if a case switch is needed
between Apache 2.2 and 2.4.

The patch _is_ needed if you want to run your Apache 2.4 without
mod_access_compat — which probably will vanish in some future Apache
release as its sole purpose is to provide Apache 2.2
authentication/authorization syntax in Apache 2.4, i.e. needs to be
applied at some point in the future for sure.

and has the potential of creating a lot of heartache by taking it
out...

Only if there are people out there who don't rely on distro-built
packages and want the newest version of Xymon on their oldest boxes,

On Tue, 2019-03-26 at 13:37 -0700, Japheth Cleaver wrote:

Hello all,

I'm pushing for a release of 4.3.29 relatively soon. I've been trying to
go through the backlog to identify un-applied patches, but I know there
are some that I'm missing. If you have build fixes or runtime changes
that have not yet been put in in 4.3.29 already (see:
https://sourceforge.net/p/xymon/code/HEAD/tree/branches/4.3.29/Changes),
I'd appreciate if you could point them out.

-----Original Message-----
From: Xymon <xymon-bounces at xymon.com> On Behalf Of Japheth Cleaver
Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2019 2:38 PM
To: Xymon Mailing List <xymon at xymon.com>
Subject: [EXT] [Xymon] Call for 4.3.29 Patches

Hello all,

I'm pushing for a release of 4.3.29 relatively soon. I've been trying to go through the backlog to identify un-applied patches, but I know there are some that I'm missing. If you have build fixes or runtime changes that have not yet been put in in 4.3.29 already (see: 

Hello all,

I'm pushing for a release of 4.3.29 relatively soon. I've been trying to go through the backlog to identify un-applied patches, but I know there are some that I'm missing. If you have build fixes or runtime changes that have not yet been put in in 4.3.29 already (see: https://sourceforge.net/p/xymon/code/HEAD/tree/branches/4.3.29/Changes), I'd appreciate if you could point them out.

Regards,

-jc

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Schmidt (tschmidt) 
Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2019 4:18 PM
To: 'Japheth Cleaver' <user-87556346d4af@xymon.invalid>; Xymon Mailing List <xymon at xymon.com>
Subject: RE: [EXT] [Xymon] Call for 4.3.29 Patches

I have a few patches to submit as well.  Attached is a context diff file for my changes to the 4.3.28 source files.  Comments includes for most of the changes.

Tom

-----Original Message-----
From: Xymon <xymon-bounces at xymon.com> On Behalf Of Japheth Cleaver
Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2019 2:38 PM
To: Xymon Mailing List <xymon at xymon.com>
Subject: [EXT] [Xymon] Call for 4.3.29 Patches

Hello all,

I'm pushing for a release of 4.3.29 relatively soon. I've been trying to go through the backlog to identify un-applied patches, but I know there are some that I'm missing. If you have build fixes or runtime changes that have not yet been put in in 4.3.29 already (see: 
https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsourceforge.net%2Fp%2Fxymon%2Fcode%2FHEAD%2Ftree%2Fbranches%2F4.3.29%2FChanges&amp;data=user-e68b78a42832@xymon.invalid%7C40feb9989dd94966d8f008d6b22af49f%7Cf38a5ecd28134862b11bac1d563c806f%7C0%7C0%7C636892294904732386&amp;sdata=aE7E5XBovDee%2FIFl7Ec%2FSL3PQ7RTeNDM8zOEDTj8lKc%3D&amp;reserved=0),
I'd appreciate if you could point them out.

Regards,

-jc

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 01:37:32PM -0700, Japheth Cleaver wrote:

I'm pushing for a release of 4.3.29 relatively soon. I've been
trying to go through the backlog to identify un-applied patches, but
I know there are some that I'm missing. If you have build fixes or
runtime changes that have not yet been put in in 4.3.29 already
(see: https://sourceforge.net/p/xymon/code/HEAD/tree/branches/4.3.29/Changes),
I'd appreciate if you could point them out.

		Kind regards, Axel
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On 4/11/2019 9:30 AM, Axel Beckert wrote:
. .. .

One thing I noticed very recently which might be worth considering for
4.3.29:

xymond/etcfiles/xymonserver.cfg.DIST contains:

NTPDATEOPTS="-u -q -p 1"

If on the host running xymond, ntpdate from the ntpsec project is
installed, then I just get the warning:

$ ntpdate -u -q -p 1 127.0.0.1
ntpdate: -p is no longer supported.
2019-04-11 19:22:28.524619 (-0200) +0.000002 +/- 0.000053 127.0.0.1 s4 no-leap
$

So it might be an idea to drop the "-p 1" completely.

On Thu, Apr 11, 2019 at 10:33:51AM -0800, John Thurston wrote:

So it might be an idea to drop the "-p 1" completely.

That seems premature. The fact that ntpseq has dropped the parameter
does not make it common or standard.

Dropping the "-p 1" option means ntpdate will attempt to collect
more than one time sample before returning. In all man pages I've
consulted the default value for "samples" is 4. Which means that
each non-answering server will block that xymonnet queue for three
additional seconds.

If you're using ntpsec, I don't think it is unreasonable to expect
you to tweak that parameter on your own server.

I don't think it is reasonable to build in a 4x longer delay for
everyone.

		Kind regards, Axel
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On 4/11/2019 12:12 PM, Axel Beckert wrote:

Hi John,

On Thu, Apr 11, 2019 at 10:33:51AM -0800, John Thurston wrote:

So it might be an idea to drop the "-p 1" completely.

That seems premature. The fact that ntpseq has dropped the parameter
does not make it common or standard.

I expect ntpsec to become standard in the near future. See
https://www.ntpsec.org/FAQ.html#_why_ntpsec why.

I though must admit, that we're still far away from there, at least in
Debian:
https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=ntpsec%2Cntpsec-ntpdate%2Cntp%2Cntpdate&show_installed=on&want_legend=on&want_ticks=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1

But a decline of ntp installations is clearly visible in that graph
(probably due to systemd also providing a time service, though).

And ntpsec is not yet available in a Debian Stable release, but will
be in the upcoming Debian 10 release "buster".

And what also just became clear to me is that only the ntp-announce
mailing list is dead with only a single mail since mid 2015 (c.f.
http://lists.ntp.org/pipermail/announce/), but there seems to be at
least about 1 security update per year:
http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Main/SecurityNotice

Maybe forking off ntpsec in 2015 was a kinda wakeup call, at least the
amount of security fixes in 2016 was much high than in the years
afterwards.

I don't think it is reasonable to build in a 4x longer delay for
everyone.

I think Xymon should support both variants by using default settings
which work with both implementations.

But maybe it should indeed do that only with a later release, when
ntpsec gained more traction and is available in more stable
distributions.

		Kind regards, Axel

		Kind regards, Axel
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On Thu, Apr 11, 2019 at 5:18 PM Axel Beckert <user-bc188e45dae4@xymon.invalid> wrote:

Hi JC,

On Thu, Apr 11, 2019 at 01:07:11PM -0700, Japheth Cleaver wrote:
[ntpsec's ntpdate dropped -p option]

Axel: Is that ending up in xymonnet.log, or is it elsewhere?

It's ending up in the report itself:

Thu Apr 11 18:40:41 2019 ntp NOT ok

Service ntp on kote5 is not OK : Service unavailable

Command: ntpdate -u -q -p 1 127.0.0.1 2>&1

ntpdate: -p is no longer supported.
ntpdig: 127.0.0.1: Response dropped: stratum 0, probable KOD packet
ntpdig: no eligible servers

(The last two lines are from a not fully started ntpd.)

And over STDERR?

Over STDERR, yes.

It also does seem to still exit with zero, so the only result is this
warning (unrecognized by Xymon as such) in the report.

So I'd say, as of now, it's indeed safe to keep "-p 1" as it still
works. The errors in the example (which actually triggered my mail
initially) above were caused by other issues, i.e. the red state was
legit. :-)

Later (i.e. with a fixed configuration and ntpd running for a while)
it looked like this:

Thu Apr 11 18:59:44 2019 ntp ok

Service ntp on kote5 is OK (up)

Command: ntpdate -u -q 127.0.0.1 2>&1

2019-04-11 18:59:44.967208 (-0200) -0.000018 +/- 0.000064 127.0.0.1 s3
no-leap

In comparison to old ntpdate looks like this:

Fri Mar 29 13:42:50 2019 ntp ok

Service ntp on kote5 is OK (up)

Command: ntpdate -u -q -p 1 127.0.0.1 2>&1

server 127.0.0.1, stratum 2, offset -0.000018, delay 0.02570
29 Mar 13:42:53 ntpdate[25715]: adjust time server 127.0.0.1 offset
-0.000018 sec

(No proper time format, no time zone, no year, duplicated information,
multi-line, etc. :-)

                Kind regards, Axel
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Hi JC,

On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 01:37:32PM -0700, Japheth Cleaver wrote:

I'm pushing for a release of 4.3.29 relatively soon.

On 4/11/2019 11:20 PM, Andy Smith wrote:

Hi JC,

On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 01:37:32PM -0700, Japheth Cleaver wrote:

I'm pushing for a release of 4.3.29 relatively soon.

These 2 changes allow you to run the client from a shared directory.

*** ./client/runclient.sh.FCS   Wed Jan 27 21:12:32 2016
--- ./client/runclient.sh       Fri Apr 12 07:14:38 2019
***************
*** 86,92 ****
                rm -f $XYMONCLIENTHOME/logs/clientlaunch.$MACHINEDOTS.pid
        fi

!       $XYMONCLIENTHOME/bin/xymonlaunch 
--config=$XYMONCLIENTHOME/etc/clientlaunch.cfg 
--log=$XYMONCLIENTHOME/logs/clientlaunch.log 
--pidfile=$XYMONCLIENTHOME/logs/clientlaunch.$MACHINEDOTS.pid
        if test $? -eq 0; then
                echo "Xymon client for $SERVEROSTYPE started on 
$MACHINEDOTS"
        else
--- 86,92 ----
                rm -f $XYMONCLIENTHOME/logs/clientlaunch.$MACHINEDOTS.pid
        fi

!       $XYMONCLIENTHOME/bin/xymonlaunch 
--config=$XYMONCLIENTHOME/etc/clientlaunch.cfg 
--log=$XYMONCLIENTHOME/logs/clientlaunch.$MACHINEDOTS.log 
--pidfile=$XYMONCLIENTHOME/logs/clientlaunch.$MACHINEDOTS.pid
        if test $? -eq 0; then
                echo "Xymon client for $SERVEROSTYPE started on 
$MACHINEDOTS"
        else

*** ./client/clientlaunch.cfg.FCS       Wed Apr 10 09:40:32 2019
--- ./client/clientlaunch.cfg   Fri Apr 12 07:14:55 2019
***************
*** 17,28 ****
        DISABLED
        ENVFILE $XYMONCLIENTHOME/etc/xymonclient.cfg
        CMD $XYMONCLIENTHOME/bin/msgcache --no-daemon 
--pidfile=$XYMONCLIENTLOGS/msgcache.pid
!       LOGFILE $XYMONCLIENTLOGS/msgcache.log

  # The main client task
  [client]
        ENVFILE $XYMONCLIENTHOME/etc/xymonclient.cfg
        CMD $XYMONCLIENTHOME/bin/xymonclient.sh
!       LOGFILE $XYMONCLIENTLOGS/xymonclient.log
        INTERVAL 5m

--- 17,28 ----
        DISABLED
        ENVFILE $XYMONCLIENTHOME/etc/xymonclient.cfg
        CMD $XYMONCLIENTHOME/bin/msgcache --no-daemon 
--pidfile=$XYMONCLIENTLOGS/msgcache.pid
!       LOGFILE $XYMONCLIENTLOGS/msgcache.$MACHINEDOTS.log

  # The main client task
  [client]
        ENVFILE $XYMONCLIENTHOME/etc/xymonclient.cfg
        CMD $XYMONCLIENTHOME/bin/xymonclient.sh
!       LOGFILE $XYMONCLIENTLOGS/xymonclient.$MACHINEDOTS.log
        INTERVAL 5m